Introduction to Bistro Girls: Stories

          In my early twenties I attempted to become a “literary” writer. Although I may have had noble intentions, numerous factors contributed to my first stories ending up as failures. I had studied English literature as an undergraduate, reading the required classics, and hardly a substantial amount of contemporary works. Approaching a text from a creative writer’s perspective remained a foreign concept in light of all the academic emphasis on developing a “critical eye.” How or why a writer employed certain elements of craft, such as point of view or narrative moment, were elusive decisions to me, even though I could identify those elements easily. Because I hadn’t read enough current authors, my concept of contemporary literary fiction was cloudy. “Character driven” fiction seemingly meant to write with “plotlessness,” for I couldn’t yet see the ways literary writers intricately incorporated plot in contemporary works. This preconception formed a bad habit of my writing, resulting in stories where nothing much happened by the end.

The UCF MA in Writing program, and later, MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, pushed me to remedy these novice tendencies by providing arenas in which to study and discuss a variety of contemporary authors. I realized that for my writing to work, I needed to learn how to decisively engage with craft: protagonists needed to be active, scenes needed setting up and paying off, and engaging the audience meant developing more structured plots with definite conflict. I needed to revise and edit my own work in a scrupulous manner to achieve this level of quality.

            For the first part of the UCF program, I tried to write a novel that became a struggle I had to reluctantly abandon. The experience proved worthwhile, because throughout I could see the patterns of what didn’t work in my fiction. Often the plot meandered or became simply episodic. At times, clarity was obscured by long-winded prose, and it was difficult to keep the alternating first person viewpoints unique. I made the decision to switch and work on contemporary short stories for my thesis with certain goals in mind. Most importantly, I needed to work on tighter focus, deeper characters, and dramatic structure. I still wanted the challenge of working with a particular group of characters living in a certain location, only without the risk of getting bogged down with the intricacies and bulk of a novel. The best way to achieve my aim was to structure the collection as an interconnected group of short stories.

            I looked to several authors to provide both stylistic and structural models, in particular, Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan, Carson McCullers, and Lorrie Moore. In different ways, these writers similarly explore themes present in my collection, Bistro Girls, namely, the sometimes joyous but often painful journey of relationships that have their roots in love and insecurity, showing how artificially-built expectations often result in disappointment.  

            The short stories and novellas of Carson McCullers do not contain an interconnected structure, but share such a distinct sense of place and types of characters intrinsic to the American South that the work exhibits an “interconnected” quality. Reading McCullers inspired the prevalent theme of the stories in Bistro Girls. McCullers says in The Ballad of the Sad Café that the state of being loved is “intolerable” to many people due to the lover’s continuous attempts to try and “strip bare” his or her beloved. For McCullers this occurs for the character of Miss Amelia after adopting her newly beloved Cousin Lymon, only to have him abandon her years later and go off with Marvin Macy. As a result, Miss Amelia becomes an embittered old woman, much like her old lover, Macy. Having once had his affections spurned by Miss Amelia, Macy plummets into a life of destroying others and himself.  

            My stories “The Coffee Shop” and “Disconnect” are variations on this theme. I chose to use omniscient narration for “The Coffee Shop” to reveal the relationship between Valerie and Don in a more “slice of life” manner, in contrast to the closer narrative viewpoints in the other stories centered on these characters. Valerie’s despair is painfully apparent in her conversation with Don, and he combats her endless straining to “capture” him as her beloved. A better understanding of Don’s inability to shake off his feeling of “entrapment” even after breaking up with Valerie is illustrated through the third person perspective of “Disconnect.” His inner conflict culminates in the realization that failing to reconcile his feelings will ultimately cause him more pain, but he remains unable to emotionally overcome this. The moment of actual “disconnect” occurs in the final sentence, when “He didn’t want to face the pain if seeing his number, she didn’t answer the phone.” Even though he set up the events so that he expected finality, Don still feels disappointment for his failings concerning himself. He is forever a man who will never be completely satisfied. Don proved the most difficult to fully render, but I was drawn to the complexity of constructing an eccentric, controversial male character.  

            Love as an “entrapment” largely brought on by the individual’s insecurities is a main cause of conflict for this cast of characters. The fear of “entrapment” and subsequent disappointment translates into friendships as well as romantic relationships. In “Bistro Girls,” Valerie questions her idea of friendship after she learns Lori once worked as a stripper. Rachel’s demise into addiction makes any decision to befriend a reformed “bad girl” like Lori a serious one. Though still having reservations about Lori, Valerie has grown past this at the time “Bobby Blues” takes place, and her reluctance is of a different sort, this time concerning Lori’s whimsical nature. There, a closer friendship between the two women evolves in the foreground, parallel to Valerie’s dilemma with Bobby. In this instance, I examined the works of Amy Tan and Louise Erdrich to learn how to display pivotal moments of character growth. Tan’s mother-daughter focus and Erdrich’s navigation of many female dynamics with her characters Sister Leopolda, Marie, and Lulu maximize the benefits of an interconnected structure. Each story works like a magnifying glass to bring certain characters’ situations front and center, leaving others more tertiary.  

            The disappointment of love founded on insecurity and false expectation takes a different turn in “Scout’s Honor,” a story more similar to Lorrie Moore's fiction in style and tone. Like the characters of Olena and Nick in Moore’s “Community Life,” Scout and Harry try to keep the threads of their unraveling romance together, even to the point of going through with the wedding. Neither wants to confront the truth until Scout finally accepts that she must end their relationship. She nearly succeeds in deceiving herself about her own insecurities until the final note, when her finger “throbbed and ached, alive.” She can no longer hide if she desires to mature beyond what led her to the marriage mistake, and facing the truth means pain. Finally she heads in the right direction, though the sense of hope remains slight at best, for Scout has a great deal to learn from her experience.

            This ending perhaps doesn’t have the optimistic potential that the resolution of “Bobby Blues” does, with the protagonist, Valerie, driving off to “check out some new scenery.” A distinct epiphany occurs as she discards her need to identify herself through her relationships with men, though only temporary. “Scout’s Honor” has the potential for a more upbeat ending like “Bobby Blues,” but I chose to intentionally bypass that avenue with a poignant image I believed to be more true to the original development of the mood. The stark physical discomfort of the finger at the end represents the surfacing of Scout’s emotional pain and creates more of a final resonance. Likewise, in “Community Life” Moore’s ending contains a similar bodily imagery, as Olena goes in for a routine gynecology exam in which medical students participate: “There were rubber fingers inside her, moving, wriggling around, but not like the others.” The story ends on a strikingly disturbing note as Moore uses the outward physical discomfort to match the inward suffering of the protagonist.         

            I encountered numerous benefits and drawbacks working in this interconnected format. It was more liberating than a novel in that spans of time could be jumped over, yet at other times it felt confining to leave out details and scope that a novel format would allow, since novels are inextricably about time. “Scout’s Honor” stood out as more disconnected in character and subject matter, so I had to figure out how to place Scout in another story, even just briefly, to make it a true “interconnected” collection. Now and then, this structure distracted me from keeping purely focused on one story at a time: working repeatedly with the same characters it was tempting to think of the stories more like chapters, not stand-alone stories. Thus, I have gained great admiration for Louise Erdrich’s mastery of writing a range of stories from characters in this fashion, achieving the breadth of a world’s interdependent circumstances within the often limiting demands of individual stories. However, I feel this structure greatly allowed me to achieve my aims for the collection in creating a cast of fleshed-out characters and plotlines grown from the same setting.

Bistro Girls: Stories by Vanessa Blakeslee was twice named a finalist in the Sol Books Prose Series Contest. Stories from the collection have been published in storySouth, Harpur Palate, The Hurricane Review, Eureka Literary Magazine, and Concho River Review, among others. "Bobby Blues" was named a finalist in the 2009 Mighty River Short Story Contest at Big Muddy.